Don't Cry, My Friend: We Sponsored Samurai Sword Soul's 20th Anniversary

This one is eight months late. I kept meaning to write it and kept not writing it.

In December, Samurai Sword Soul staged their 20th anniversary production at Gibney on Broadway. We sponsored it. We provided the food, and we brought the bar with us.

Here is why that was never a hard decision.

Who Samurai Sword Soul Are

Samurai Sword Soul is a New York samurai theater company. Yoshi Amao founded it in 2003, and if his face looks familiar, he plays Sera in FX's Shōgun.

The company does three things at once: comedy, real human drama, and TATE.

What TATE Is

TATE is Japanese stage sword fighting. Not fencing, and not stunt work.

It is choreography built for an audience, where the whole point is that a fight reads clearly from the back row and lands on the beat. It is the same discipline behind the sword sequences in Japanese period film and theater.

Done badly it looks like people waving sticks. Done well, ten feet from your seat, it is genuinely alarming.

The Show

Don't Cry, My Friend ran December 3 to 7 at Gibney, 280 Broadway. Seventy minutes, built so that a four year old could sit through it, and most nights a few did.

It was an original story pulled from two Japanese folktales: Urashima Taro, and Naita Aka Oni, "The Red Oni Who Cried."

The second one is the one that gets people. A red oni wants to be friends with the humans in the village and cannot manage it. His friend the blue oni offers a plan: the blue oni will attack the village, the red one will fight him off in front of everyone, and the humans will finally trust him.

It works exactly as designed. Then the blue oni leaves town for good, so that nobody ever connects the two of them, and the red oni is left with the friendship of an entire village and without the one friend who arranged it.

That is the story a company chose to build its twentieth anniversary on. Not a triumph.

Two People On That Stage

Shiho Matsuoka has been a friend of ours for years. She is from Kyoto, spent about a decade producing in journalism, then left it to act full time. She is in the company.

And the family across the street had someone on that stage.

Ramen Ishida is at 122 Ludlow. We are at 121. Yohei runs the shop directly opposite ours, and his son was up there doing sword work in front of a paying audience.

At that point sponsoring is not really a marketing decision. It is showing up for your block.

What We Actually Did

We handled the food. We did not stop there, and I want to be straight about how the rest of it worked.

Every ticket to that run came with an open bar. For a five day theater run that is not a small line item, and one izakaya on Ludlow Street cannot quietly underwrite it.

So we made calls. We brought in Dassai Blue and Satoshiki as sponsors alongside us, and Kenbishi and Sapporo came in as well. Koikeya sent chips. Sake, whisky, beer and something salty to eat between them, covered by the people who make them.

I would rather say that plainly than let it read like we bankrolled a week of free drinks on our own. We did not. We put in the food, and then we used the relationships we have with the producers whose bottles we pour all year to cover the bar and the snacks.

That is the honest version, and I think it is the more useful one. A small restaurant cannot fund a theater company. It can pick up the phone, and it can feed everybody.

Thank You

To Yoshi and the company, to Shiho, to the Ishidas across the street, and to everyone who came through in December: thank you for letting us be part of it.

One more thing came out of that week. Fuka from Edamovement Lab was working it, found out we were sponsoring, and asked why we were not sponsoring her too. We are now.

Twenty years of samurai theater in New York is not a small thing to have built. Being the ones feeding it for a week was an easy yes, and I would do it again tomorrow.

Next time I will write about it before August.

More of the people we work with.